Gardening is hard

My new hobby this summer has been becoming an expert gardener. I love flowers (mostly looking at them), and I see magazine articles at the grocery store of these absolutely BEAUTIFUL landscapes. Then I will spend several hours throughout the week glued to some home and garden episode of Curb Appeal or Yard Crashers, thinking I can do that! Then there’s this lady at my job who is always chatting about the positives of having a garden. I think I could envision myself with some type of garden scene in my backyard. I’ve got a house I really like with a blank slate back yard, and so I think it’s only right that I build some type of nature preserve.

Well it all sounded good in theory, but executing has been a different story! So we started off with this landscaper who did about 75% of what he quoted to us. But it wasn’t so bad, because I think we only paid him about 85% of what we agreed to. But he got us off to a good start. We have a couple of flower beds now with roses and some other perennials in the back yard. Then he planted a bunch of annuals in the front yard, put down mulch around all the trees and shrubs and cleaned up otherwise desolate sections. So I took it upon myself to purchase some perennials and big art deco style pots for my deck and porch. It all looked really nice in the beginning, but then I realized the importance of watering. Thank God for the rainy May and June we had. But I’m learning, I have to actually go out EVERY day and water these things. The end products are beautiful, but when you miss a couple of days, it’s horrible. Blooms and soil dries up and the plant starts to give you this pitiful look of misery.

Watering isn’t easy either. At first I had this watering pot that required 2-3 fill ups, and that I walked around the yard with. That turned into watering what was within close proximity and ignoring the yard plants. But after doing that May and June, I can’t take the look of my yard plants anymore, so I’m starting to engineer a sprinkler system. I went to Lowes and purchased a hodgepodge of hoses and directional sprinklers which I plan to assemble and arrange around the yard myself.

And then there’s weeding, and then next month I’ll have to start changing out the soil in some of the plants. September will be the start of planting flowers for next year. I had no idea it was this much work and I didn’t know it would take so much time! Right now, I just don’t know about next year… Gardening is really a beautiful hobby, but it’s hard.